The Black Bomb Guys: (do they have official names?)
The Blue Multipying Guys:
The White Egg Poopers:
The Red Really Angry Ones:
The Yellow Triangle Guys:
The Annoying Toucan Boomerang Bird that Nobody Likes:
The Pigs:
And now for some cookie fun:
Uh oh....
HE'S GONNA BLOW!!!
Snort, huff, snortle, pffttt.
... fighting! (Now that song is in your head. You're welcome.)
A chocolate cake with cookies and cream filling. Hey, it probably looked like Panda colors on the inside! My genius-ness works when I don't even know it!
That's bamboo. I recalled my recent trip to China in order to make these realistic.
Whoop... AH!
I've become so backlogged on my cake/cookie posts that I fear I'll never catch up. But I guess it's a good sign that I simply don't have enough time to blog because I'm too busy in the kitchen! (And with the laundry, bills, dog, kids, cleaning, and maintaining sanity.) I do however manage to get most of my photos onto Roundhouse Cake's Facebook site and also onto my website galleries, in case you're interested.
But with a slow week coming up, I hope to catch this site up with all of my latest projects.
Like this one:
I was asked to recreate a very special bapstism dress in cake form. This was one of the pictures I was sent:
I pondered buying some speciality lace cutters or eyelet cutters (is there such a thing?) but in the end decided to pipe the detail with white royal icing.
I like piping. It soothes me.
The cake itself was three layers of butter pecan, baked in a 10 inch square pan. I then cut up and arranged them into the shape of the dress. Between the layers was caramel buttercream. Luscious homemade, delectable, spoon-licking caramel. Best caramel ever. Adding it to buttercream is, well... beyond ridiculous.
I was in a bit of a quandry when it came to the bottom of the dress. I didn't want it to slope down or just abruptly end, so I decided to add fondant ruffles.
Surprisingly this cake came together quickly and without issue. I'd even made an extra batch of "uh oh" fondant and wondered if I'd be up into the wee hours of the night piping. But I wasn't. This is what you'd call a dream cake.
My instructions were: Tons of color and as much candy as possible.
Everything is fondant.
The cakes are both a fluffy white vanilla with vanilla-bean buttercream.
I'm very fortunate to have a) A 7 year old and 4 year old who claim to be Thomas experts; b) Their willingness to express opinions on my work, and c) The ability to steal their toys as inspiration.
The Thomas on the top of this cake is my best yet (Thomas cakes are popular!) and I'm not embarassed to admit that I actually layed the fondant out on the actual Thomas toy in order to get my proportions right. Don't worry, I sanitized the "kid germs" off beforehand.
The entire Thomas is made of gumpaste/fondant, making for a heavy, yet durable decoration. It was requested that I make a Thomas that can be gazed upon for years to come. Luckily gumpaste has a shelf life of 2000 years. That doesn't make it sound appetizing, but just think of it in terms of sugar.
The cake is strawberry with vanilla swiss meringue buttercream.
This cake accompanied the sea-themed cookies and cupcakes for a FANTASTIC birthday party celebrating 11 year old Ashley. I say fantastic, because I got to go! Heaven is having a table full of REAL crabs, shrimp, crawfish, corn, potatoes and bread just waiting to be eaten.
Of course the meal was finished with the sugar kind:
Ashley loves cupcakes, so we topped off the cake with one. Inside the fondant liner and icing is a REAL red velvet cupcake. The cake was red velvet, too.
I like the coral... I got jiggy with it.
Happy Birthday Ashley!
This weekend all of my grad school friends converged in DC for our yearly reunion. There is no other group of people so near and dear to my heart - and I wanted to honor "us" with a COOL cake worthy of our greatness.
There is nothing worthy of our greatness. We are all too great.
So I settled on what makes us great - our diversity.
From top left clockwise: Kenya, Canada, Dominican Republic, Argentina, South Korea, and the USA.
From left to right on the sides: India, Cuba, China, and Armenia.
From left to right: Namibia, Croatia, Great Britain, and Iran.
We could start our own United Nations if we wanted too!
For my little buddy made in the UK:
Clara represented Old Glory:
On a less exciting side-note, the flags were made from royal icing. Not ONE broke, which makes me the king royal icing ruler of the world. Oh, and the cake was butter pecan (new favorite flavor!) with a caramel buttercream filling.
For a high school grad - decorated with her school colors:
I've wanted to do something with gradients for a while... finally got my chance!
That's a lot of dots. Eventually my eyes broke and I couldn't distinguish between the various shades. A shot of espresso put 'em back right.
And the bow, also in the various gradient colors:
Lovin the tassel too!
The accompanying cupcakes:
Cake was vanilla/vanilla buttercream and chocolate/chocolate buttercream.
This was the formal one:
His name was written along the bottom of the oak leaf, but in order to be somewhat anonymous I fuzzed it out. He's a private man.
The oak leaf is a royal icing transfer painted with silver lustre dust. I tried to make it look three dimensional... mulled over it for a while and decided that shading the leaves was the way to go.
The inside was The Superfudge. After the promotion ceremony, the cake was cut and gone in about 6 minutes flat.
Last Friday we hosted a party in celebration of my husband's recent promotion. Since it was his party, I asked him to order his custom cake with the "sky as his limit." In return, I demanded his pay raise for the next 3 years. Fair trade, no?
Not surprisingly, he asked for a beer bottle cake. He'd gone to a recent cake convention with me and had raved about this:
Looks to me like someone just stuck some beer bottles in a cake. But upon closer inspection, they are indeed made from sugar.
How the what the huh?
Oh boy, the challenge had been set!
I started researching online how to make beer bottles out of sugar. I found places that sold molds, kits to make molds, and the actual bottles. All too expensive. I then found a tutorial that - if it worked - would only put me out $14.
So I bought a tub of this:
Then spent 3 days smearing it all over a real beer bottle. Each coat had to dry and it takes at least 12-15 coats to get it thick enough. Once the entire bottle is coated, you roll it off and TADA!....
It's not a pretty thing, I admit. The mangled bottle laying next to it was my first attempt at pouring the sugar. Obviously it didn't go well. The trick is to get your sugar heated up to over 300 degrees, than slowly pour it into the mold while rotating it over and over. Oh, and the sugar is as hot as molten lava. But if you wear big gloves and work the mold slowly, it will eventually harden and come out perfectly.
If that last sentence embarrasses you, trying being the one in the kitchen massaging this bad boy over and over ALL WEEK in front of your extended family. It got weird.
But it was worth it!
Custom made labels (regrettably not with edible ink...)
Yes, that's my husbands face:
The ice is also made from sugar - a special kind of sugar that doesn't yellow at high temperatures. Who even knew?!
The barrel was the cake - two cakes stack on top of each other. Both had three layes, one of chocolate, one of vanilla, and one of strawberry. Hmm... where's that picture? It looked good and was pretty darn tasty.
So, consider beer bottle cakes on the Roundhouse Cakes menu! What else am I gonna do with the mold?
